Thread: My site - how to SEO

How can I get more hits to my site when people search for lawn care/mowing/maintenance in my area? I just signed up for adwords but its pending approval because my last name has something to do with pharmacy crap.

- download an SEO extension for Chrome or Firefox. I've always liked Firefox's SEOQuake and Chrome's SEO for Chrome. Just install, hit your site pages and click "Diagnose". Now that I'm looking, as of now, your site essentially has zero SEO...and I immediately see why. Inexplicably, your site is built on frames. The engines will likely see only your home page, which consists of this code:

Also, start adding in relevant H tags, especially on your service keywords. Same goes for the TITLE tags on each page. And be sure to make them relevant.

Don't waste time on Meta Keywords, but do include them in to your content.

Then start submitting your site to useful directories and profile sites, such as Bing/Yahoo/Google Local, Manta, ServiceVines.com, etc. Be sure that the address you use for each profile matches each other as that is now a strong cross-reference validator.

Check out Google's Webmaster Tools and that will be of help. Create a sitemap.xml file (google it and you'll find out how) and submit it there, as well as utilize their other tools.

I thought your site was excellent, well above average but you are right. From a SEO standpoint it is one of the worst I have seen. The title and description meta tags are important. Your title meta tag is poor and you don't have a description one at all. Keywords are not used much any more but I would still recommend having them and you don't. You really have not designed your site for search engine results at all. There are a lot of resources to learn about this. Research it a bit and modify your site.

Use the keywords in your text and do it early. I would not use the H tag unless it fits the message.

I think you also need to be less secretive. If I were a homeowner I would never contact you from your website.

The search engines have started getting better at handling frames, as you can see when you follow Tony's link, the description for your domain IS pulling from the inside frame. and if you change the domain in the search he linked to over to the one that actually is serving the pages, you will see that domain does list all of your lawn care inside pages.

I would definitely agree on getting rid of the frames though, get all of the pages to load directly from the lawn care domain instead of your other domain. While I can't say for sure how much it will affect your rankings, currently to google it looks like your domain does nothing but link out to other sites.

In the tool I linked to, at the top left, there is an (i) icon, click on that and it will give you some more information, a lot of it is available in the SEO Quake tool (BTW, if you turn on SEO Quake when you are already at your site, the Diagnose button may not be there, just hit Refresh. Also depending on your screen width, you may not see it as it is the far right button, you may have to hover on the arrow on the right side to scroll to it)

Anyhow, as you can see, there isn't really a lot of meat for the search engines to grab.

Google the terms you are looking for, now use the SEO Quake Diagnose and the link I gave you above to look at every page that comes up on the first page or two of results. You will see a huge difference. That is the plus side of the web, when it comes to sites and SEO you can see most everything that the other person put into their sites to learn how to get better.

Another thing to get is good quality back links to your site, using your terms you are targeting as the link text. Yahoo used to have a great tool for this which sadly they got rid of when they started using Bing for search results. You can do it via google, though: link:domain.com (but in not sure how accurate this anymore. I myself use a tool that gets me the list)

Lastly, I would be concerned about the load time of your page, initial load time was a whopping 3.5 seconds! Google is starting to take into consideration page load times.

Im not a pro by any means with dreamweaver and that site is evident of that lol. My lawn care business is my second job. I am a teacher and my main domain is for my students access to my website. Heres a dumb question though. Since I am currently using adwords and when somebody searches lawn care, lawn service, mowing etc in my area my add is top 2 on the page. So do I really need to work on my SEO if this is the case?

Oh, and how am I being secretive on my site? My phone number is now on the top corner of the page, there is a contact link etc. Lemme know how I can improve. Thanks again!

Heres a dumb question though. Since I am currently using adwords and when somebody searches lawn care, lawn service, mowing etc in my area my add is top 2 on the page. So do I really need to work on my SEO if this is the case?

I'm confused by what your intent is for your site. Your opening post was asking what to do to improve your site's search engine performance, and you received very good advice from a few of us (that is quite simple to implement), and now you're asking if you really need to do this?

The simple answer is "yes", if you want low-to-no-cost organic search traffic to show up at your site. If you don't want to, AdWords will work for you, but you will pay for it. The goal should be to start driving traffic to your site, via AdWords, and then weening yourself off to good, organic (free) traffic.